Partisan Witch Hunt?

From James Taranto's Best of the Web:

'Not a Contemporary Piece of Information'
During yesterday's 9/11 commission hearing, Democratic lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste tried to set a trap for Condoleezza Rice over an August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing:

Ben-Veniste: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

Rice: I believe the title was, Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.

Now, the . . .

Ben-Veniste: Thank you.

Rice: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste . . .

Ben-Veniste: I will get into the . . .

Rice: I would like to finish my point here.

Ben-Veniste: I didn't know there was a point.

Rice: Given that--you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.

Ben-Veniste: I asked you what the title was.

Rice: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.

Ben-Veniste's rudeness was clear for all to see, but to understand just how dishonest was his line of questioning, look at this article from the May 27, 2002, issue of Human Events, a conservative Washington weekly:

Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration.

"Yes, we had seen all the information," said Graham. "But we didn't see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did."

Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."

Graham is far from a supporter of the Bush administration, as he made clear last year in his brief but loopy presidential campaign. The 9/11 commission is supposed to be an impartial search for the truth. Is there any doubt that Ben-Veniste is guilty of trying to turn it into a partisan witch hunt?

In other words Bush=Hitler.